Perfect Circle
by karebear
Summary: "Maker, you are so much like him." "Yeah. I have actually heard that before." Ten years after Kirkwall, Anders' family can finally heal. [After-Kirkwall headcanon is the same as Say It Anyway and Desperately Lonely. Anders/Amell, Anders/Hawke, Amell/Cullen]


Lexa wakes up screaming. Tears stream down her face. Her stomach aches, so intensely that she feels like she wants to throw up. It _hurts_. She feels empty inside. She wants her mommy, misses her so badly. She needs her but she can't get to her, or Daddy, not now and not ever. They're gone. They're gone forever, but they're supposed to be here. It's not fair! She fights the knowledge. She kicks and thrashes, tangling her bedsheets around her leg. Her fists pound against her mattress.

Flames lick all around her, but she doesn't notice them. She is angry. Scared. And so, _so _lonely. She _wants_. She wants Mommy and Daddy, more than she has ever wanted anything in her entire life.

She hears yelling, someone calling her name. Daddy's voice. She tries so hard to reach him, but she _can't_. Her small hand stretches outward, grabbing for him, but it closes around empty air. Heat licks at her bare flesh, but she barely notices that. "Daddy," she cries. Her throat burns as her tears turn into choking coughs. "Daddy, I'm sorry."

Shivers wrack her tiny frame as the air around her freezes. Panic claws at her. She squeezes her eyes shut and curls into a ball, knowing she has to hide. That's what Mommy told her. Hide. The air is so cold it hurts. Broken wet blisters make her skin sticky beneath curled up fists.

"Oh, Lexy..." someone murmurs. She feels an electric tingle as healing magic begins to sweep over her in gentle, focused waves. She lets her eyes drift closed as she relaxes, grasping for that familiar comfort. She listens to the voice and knows it isn't her father, but his magic tastes the same. No, not the same. Sweeter. Brighter. Matt's magic has more salt and fire in it; it feels like being out on the sailboat, with the smoothed wood beneath her fingers and the wind blowing in off of the lake.

She whines as her brother stands up, clearing his throat nervously as someone else takes his place on her bed. "Lexa, sweetie," Rhyanon Amell whispers. "It's okay. You're okay. It's just a nightmare." She drapes her arm around the little girl's shoulder, soothing her without trying, sending out flickers of calming magic.

Lexa's fists pound down against the older mage's arms. It must hurt, but Rhyanon doesn't even flinch. "It isn't," Lexa whines. "It isn't, it's _real_." She tells them about heat and choking dust, the cracked ground of barren fields and the hotter sands of the arena where the Chantry executed those who needed to bleed publicly to be absolved of their sins.

Rhyanon glances up, meeting Cullen's eyes. The darkness reflected there in the templar's nervous gaze confirms that he is just as unsettled as Rhyanon is. Lexa had never been there, in the killing fields of Val Royeaux; Cullen and Rhyanon both had made sure of that. But a cold chill freezes Rhyanon just the same, because the description is too accurate to be anything less than real. And they're _mages_. She knows full well that the boundaries of time and space do not apply for them, not in the same way as for most people. Most people don't set their bedrooms on fire when they dream about things they shouldn't remember.

Rhyanon draws in a ragged breath and tries to stop herself from crying, as the old pain and guilt and anger stab through her heart like a violent needle. Her stomach hurts. Three years. Three years to the day since Anders and Callin Hawke were beheaded in a public spectacle, a capstone that would satiate the people's bloodlust, after weeks of torture in the Chantry's hidden bowels. They were not allowed to die alone in the dark, at least. There's still the part of Rhyanon that is twistedly grateful for that, because she knows that Anders would've claimed it as a victory. Even dying, he played by his own rules.

Rhyanon rests her hand against Lexa's cheek and looks into the girl's eyes. "Listen to me," she says carefully. "Your father loved you. More than _anything_."

Lexa nods absently, hearing the words, but they are not loud enough to drown out her father's call. She wants him, and he needs her. She stretches out. It's just a little further. She can get to him, she knows she can...

She recoils and begins to sputter as her air is sucked away, as though a crashing wave has slammed her down into the sand; still hot beneath her fingers. But the ghosts are fading into mist, she can't hear them anymore, not as clearly. She squirms in Mel's arms. The burns from the fire she'd inadvertenly started are healed now. Lexa doesn't even notice.

Rhyanon glances up, aware of Matt watching her with narrowed eyes, an unspoken accusation hiding there in his glare. "I had to drain her mana," Rhyanon says lamely, though she should not feel the need to explain herself to an eighteen-year-old. Not even one who looks _so much like him_. "She was pulling too much." Matt just shrugs.

"Matty!" Lexa yells, reaching out for him as he starts to walk away. He needs to get out of here, away from here. He doesn't understand anything that's happening, and his fear sparks a twitchy need for motion in his limbs. But at the sound of Lexa's voice, her older brother stops in his tracks. "Don't go," she begs him. She pulls herself out of Rhyanon's arms and runs to the teenage boy, wrapping herself around his legs. He has already made it out to the hallway, a few long steps down from her bedroom door. She knows he is running from the fire she started – Matt is afraid of fire. And it still smells like smoke even though Mel made the flames go away. But Lexa doesn't want him to go any further. He can't leave her alone!

Matt clears his throat uncomfortably and crouches down to hold the little girl. He gives her an awkward hug. "I'm not going anywhere," he promises. His eyes flicker upward, toward Cullen, toward Rhyanon, seeking permission, or help, some explanation of what he should do. The adults, their adoptive parents, stand watching them, with uncertain glances flickering between them. Matt is not an idiot. He knows there are things Cullen and Mel haven't told him in the three years since the Hero of Ferelden had rescued him from the Denerim streets like in some story.

Lexa pulls on his hand. "Don't be scared," she insists, determined. Matt frowns.

"I'm not scared," he lies.

"I'm scared," Lexa whispers.

Matt sighs. "I know," he admits. How could she not be? In his head he still sees the flickering flames; he can hear the crackling of the fire. He crouches on the balls of his feet and reaches upward to tuck a strand of hair behind the little girl's ear. "You know it's going to be okay, don't you? Mel will protect you. And Cullen."

Lexa just shakes her head. She pulls away as Cullen comes closer, trying to do what he can to help both of them. "I want Mommy and Daddy!" she yells. She burrows into Matt's shirt, shrinking into a ball, as small as she can. Her heart pounds in her ears as the templar reaches out for her.

Matt glances up at Cullen with wary eyes. The older man retreats from the two children. He goes and takes Rhyanon in his arms instead. She watches the two of them, Anders' children, and her heart breaks. "This isn't _right_," she whispers. Cullen says nothing. Of course it isn't. Yet there is nothing they can do to change it or fix it. There never is, not in this place.

As they watch, Matt comforts the child in his arms. With steady fingers, he combs her tangled hair and massages her back. "You know your mom and dad are with the Maker now," he reminds her gently. "They're happy. They're living in a huge white castle, and there's green meadows all around them, and they love you and they're always watching over you. Okay?"

Rhyanon squirms in Cullen's arms, but she can't help feeling that the comforting lie Matt tells hurts a lot less than the truth. Maybe it will be enough.

"_Odio et maledictus_,"* Lexa murmurs. It seems she trusts the lie about as much as Rhyanon does. "_Non erit requies. In hoc mundo vel extra._" *

Cullen draws in a sharp breath, and Rhyanon squeezes her eyes shut, overwhelmed by the familiar certainty of the words. They hurt even more coming from an eight-year-old, a spitting accusation. And Lexa shouldn't know them. Rhyanon had never taught the kids the Chant, none of them. On purpose. She wants them safe from the fear and pain embedded in those doctrines. How can Lexa stand there calmly reciting the language that doomed her parents? The words read just before the axe swung down to kill them, the words that announced their guilt and their sentence. And now their daughter stands in the shadowed halls where Anders had once run, dodging templars, speaking their language. A language _she shouldn't know_.

"_Beati qui adsistunt coram impio_,"** Cullen and Matty both recite the words, though only one of them is capable of understanding.

"Stop it!" Rhyanon screams at both of them, though now as always, she is incapable of stopping anything.

"Those who bring harm without provocation to the least of His children are hated and accursed by the Maker," Matt insists calmly. He is no longer speaking dead arcanum, yet that doesn't make Rhyanon feel any better. His eyes meet hers, and neither of them can break away. He stands up, moving slowly, as though controlled by some unseen, invisible force.

Rhyanon picks Lexa up, without thinking. The little girl doesn't protest. She doesn't even seem to notice. There is a dangerous glint in the child's eyes, a thin smile on her face. "We have to remind them," she murmurs.

Rhyanon glances down, and the girl watches her with widened eyes and an unnatural calm, even as Rhyanon struggles to breath as waves of pain from an ancient wound lick at her shoulder. Blood seeps through. "No compromises," she insists, her voice hard. Lexa nods.

Rhyanon breathes, and counts her breaths and heartbeats as she listens. Her lips barely move, but she counts, a familiar slow addition that transcends time and place. The first _crack _is always the worst, when it breaks the careful silence. One.

She can feel the pressure of Lexa's palm pushing hard against her bleeding wound as the next lash lands. Two.

But though Rhyanon flinches and Lexa squirms in her arms, both feeling the pain, it touches neither of them. A line of blood cuts through Matt's back as he huddles on the ground, shaking and crying. Another crack, another line of blood. Three.

Cullen is counting too, cold and emotionless. He watches with hardened eyes. His stomach twists as one part of his mind registers the _wrongness _of this, the innocent boy bleeding from phantom wounds, gasping for breath as he struggles through the agony. Yet Cullen is paralyzed by the script, the role he is forced to perform, the duty he cannot abandon. Twenty lashes. Then – only then – he can help.

He doesn't look at Rhyanon, though he knows she's watching too. Four. Five. A hazy purple barrier traps them inside this cage. He swears he can hear voices on the other side of it. Six. Seven. The voices never break all the way through. Whoever owns the voices will fall before he does. He is safer than they are so long as the shield remains solid.

He wrenches control of his mind away from the demons scrabbling there with cold fingers. He concentrates on counting. Slow and steady. The numbers calm him even as he watches the blood they draw with every crack of sound.

It seems to take an eternity to reach twenty, yet as he does so, the barrier flickers and then collapses completely, living only a sucking void and the absence of pressure.

He immediately drops to the ground next to Matt and does what he can to staunch the bleeding. When he glances up, Rhyanon has disappeared, along with Lexa. He shouldn't worry, and he knows that, but he cannot help himself. "Take care of him," he insists, distractedly, pushing a still-dazed Matt into the arms of a teenaged girl. Mika frowns at him, but the Howe girl doesn't protest.

Cullen stalks off, to Lexa's bedroom, where Rhyanon sits watching the girl. He can see the rise and fall of the child's breathing, and he notices the way Rhyanon's hand doesn't leave Lexa's shoulder, even as she herself is crying. And Cullen stands there, just outside the room, watching as Nathaniel comforts Rhyanon. He sighs eventually, and turns away. She's a mage and he's a templar. Even still.

He keeps his silent vigil, leaning against the tower's familiar cold stone walls. He hastily corrects his posture, reaching for the sword he no longer wears at his hip, as Nathaniel raises an eyebrow. "What happened?" the old Warden asks softly. Cullen sighs.

"I'm not... exactly sure," he hedges. He can feel a pounding at the edges of his brain, a rhythmic pulse that will explode into an agonizing migraine if he goes much longer without lyrium. "The Veil is weak here..." He doesn't know how much the other man knows about magic, and the last thing he wants is to get into a lecture on theories to explain a haunting presence Nate is incapable of feeling. "We never should have come back to Kinloch Hold," he says instead. He is certain of at least that much.

"It was the safest place," Nathaniel reminds him. Cullen nods, acknowledging the point but not agreeing.

"Is she...?"

"Sleeping now. They both are." Nate sighs, and Cullen frowns as he notices how exhausted the other man looks, with dark shadows around sunken eyes. The once-capable soldier looks thin and frail now. Is he sick?

Nate looks up at Cullen with worry all too obvious behind his calm, composed mask. "So this is a mage thing, then? Just like... a dream?"

"It's real enough, I think. It's over. Whatever it was." Cullen's head pounds, but he feels a lightness to the air. The heavy weight of old crimes and shadowed darkness seems to have passed.

He pushes his way past Nathaniel, not caring if the other man chooses to follow, until he finds himself in the tower courtyard. He listens to birds calling their songs as dawn breaks, a bright morning that sends a chill wind blowing over the still-new grass and snapping him to full alertness.

He spins around at the sound of footsteps, and frowns when he sees Matt. The boy's mana is nearly out of control, so hot it feels like a burning fire to Cullen's templar senses. He can feel the anger radiating out from the teenager. He sighs, a shiver running through his body that has nothing to do with the wind as he forces himself to recognizes where they are standing: the middle of the tower courtyard, where a whipping post used to be.

"You remember, don't you?" he asks softly. After a lifetime surrounded by mages, he's learned not to question things that ought not be possible.

Matt looks up with clouded eyes, and shrugs. "Lexa said I had to. That it's important."

"You are _not _your father, boy," Cullen reaches out to rest a hand on his adopted son's shoulder, but Matt won't let him. He glares at Cullen, with his hands clenched into tight fists at his side.

"It happened, though didn't it?" he asks, with a hard edge in his voice. "You didn't stop it. Any of it."

Cullen sighs. "Things were different then," he whispers. It is neither an excuse nor an apology. He knows that neither would be accepted. "Maker, you are _so _much like him. So stubborn..."

"Yeah," Matt murmurs. "I have actually heard that before."

"Come on," Cullen gently leads Matt over to the alcove just inside the tower. Sunlight still spills through from the outside.

Across the room, Lexa sits in Rhyanon's lap. Her fingers trace the old scar cutting across Mel's shoulder. The child's light touch makes Rhyanon shiver. It makes her stomach squirm. It's been years since she's even really noticed that mark. It's faded into the background. Not forgotten, not exactly, but not so important anymore. Life moves on. Life has gotten so much better. Yet now it seems important again. Real. Raw. Beneath Lexa's small fingers, her flesh is reddened and sensitive. "Daddy says thank you," the little girl whispers. "Thank you for saving his life."

"He says thank you for everything," Matt clarifies. Without thinking, he brushes his fingers over that re-opened lash mark across Rhyanon's arm, healing it with a simple touch. His own pain fades in the same burst of energy.

Rhyanon stiffens, at the words and at the casual way Matt wields so much more mana than he's ever shown he was capable of, the way he heals without waiting to ask permission, in the shadow of memories that should frighten him away from doing so. She frowns down at both of them, the children in her arms. _His children_. His amazing, miraculous children, who knows so much more than they should. "He loves you, you know," Matt says simply. "He always did."

Tears sting Rhyanon's eyes. She nods. Anders had never said that to her, never in those exact words. He'd never needed to. Yet hearing them now shocks her. Lexa sits, calm and unnaturally still for such a young child. She stares up at Mel with those forest-green eyes, so like her mother's. "Mommy says thank you, too. For taking care of him. For taking care of me."

Rhyanon swallows hard, yet she cannot stop the tears from falling and she finds she doesn't want to. She doesn't _have to_, not anymore. How many times in this place had they almost died, or wanted to? Yet they stayed alive, both of them.

They stayed alive and now _his children _are in _her _arms. Rhyanon hugs Lexa close, strokes her hair, kisses her. She wraps her arm around Matt. She holds them both tight against her chest, the way Anders had when she was eight years old, alone, afraid, and in pain. She can hear his laughter, his jokes, his promise that things will be okay. He told her to trust him, he told her she worried too much. He saved her life. "I love you," Rhyanon murmurs. "You know that right?"

Lexa squirms in her arms, and nods. Matt just smiles, a smirking grin that makes her want to laugh. Rhyanon wonders who she's talking to. All of them. Anders too. She knows that somehow he can hear her, the same way his children hear his voice in their dreams.

"I love you too," Lexa says. It rolls off her tongue so easily that Rhyanon struggles to breathe. To hear a mage-child declare it so fearlessly... to hear _his child_ say it, to her. It feels miraculous, yet so simple, at the same time. Utterly natural. And she feels totally safe, here in this place that had for so long haunted her nightmares.

She can still hear the echoes sometimes, but they're not as loud. Lexa says the whipcracks sound like thunder. And the little girl likes thunder, she loves rain. Because Mel does. Daddy did too.

* * *

Latin/arcanum best-guesses with the help of Google Translate

* Hated and cursed. No rest in this world or beyond

** Blessed are they who stand before the wicked


End file.
